Some Thoughts About Reddit
It’s been a ritual for me since I discovered the site three years ago: wake up, check Reddit. Browse r/worldnews for the latest events. Look for new tactics on r/hearthstone. If it’s a Monday, avoid r/asoiaf until I can watch the latest Game of Thrones episode.
Reddit has become a part of my internet life. It’s eclipsed the BBC as my go-to place for news and surpassed BoingBoing as the site I go for the latest nerdy things. Like many, I initially tried to use Reddit as a promotional tool, uploading the latest Chefs in Black comic as soon as we had them published. Most of my efforts went nowhere. Reddit is a quixotic place with its anti-promotion stance. After a while, when I settled down and used Reddit as a resource instead of a soapbox, I enjoyed the site a lot more.
One place where self-promotion was accepted was in r/IAmA, a place where anyone and everyone could go and have people ask them anything. As AmAs grew in popularity, one name was always there, helping this actor over the phone or sitting down with that music producer. That person was “Victoria from Reddit,” Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s Director of Talent…at least she was. Until she was fired without warning last Thursday and the Reddit community lost its hivemind. (See tl;drs for links to the details.)
It’s not often that my personal and professional lives intersect, but they did this week. My day job involves writing articles and things that have to do with Human Resources, and since I started working for my company I’ve learned a thing or two about HR best practices. How to do things. More importantly, how not to do things.
Victoria’s firing is a classic case of how not to do things.
Back in the day when I filled out performance evaluations for my workers, I’d always tell them “There shouldn’t be anything in this performance review that comes as a surprise. If the review is good, you should have heard praise from me throughout the year. If the review is bad, then you should know what the problems are because we’ve discussed them before. If anything in this review is a surprise, then I haven’t been doing my job as a manager.” I still believe that. Communicating with your employees is essential to keeping them engaged and doing what you need them to be doing: running your business. That Victoria has no idea why she was fired reflects poorly on Reddit’s management. That they didn’t grasp the scope of her work (which extended far beyond her job parameters, which is normal for anyone these days) or have a backup plan to deal with the fallout speaks to how out of touch the management team is with its workers.
We live in the age of the mass layoff; the mass terminations. That Victoria’s unexpected departure led to articles about it in The Guardian and Le Monde speaks volumes about how valuable an employee she was.
And that the firing of a single employee can cause major disruptions in one of the most heavily trafficked websites says something about the realities of work in 2015. Humans are no longer cogs in the machine. All those jobs that could be replaced by a series of interchangeable bodies? They’re gone. Or they’re entry-level. Because of the nature of the economy (not enough jobs, not enough promotions to go around) people have been forced to specialize just to stay employed. The downside of this mass specialization (as Reddit is now finding out) is you can’t just replace one person with another and expect a smooth transition. The goodwill Victoria generated among the people coming by to do AmAs can’t be replaced. On a website filled with just as much racism and misogyny as cat pictures, Victoria was the rare shining star, a beacon of positivity. Her departure is a great loss to the Reddit community.
tl;drs
Summary: While no one yet knows the exact reason why, Reddit’s Director of Talent Victoria’s recent firing is a huge blow to the site and a classic example of how not to fire people.
Related Reading: Gawker’s summary of the whole debacle
